She accused me of a threefold dishonesty: of lacking the courage to admit that I no longer loved her, because if I loved her I could never have etc etc; of manæuvring her into a position where she couldn’t complain when I brought home strange women; and of being a latent homosexual – that’s to say employing her as a proxy to have done to her by Fitzpiers what I really wanted Fitzpiers to do to me. I answered the first charge by explaining that it was precisely because I loved her that I wanted her to hurt me, and that if she couldn’t follow that she didn’t deserve my love; I answered the second by asking where they all were then, these women I was bringing home, and by assuring her that her infidelity was much more exciting to me than my own could ever be; and I countered the final calumny by laughing at it. Homosexual? Me? Ha! Latency charges are, of course, notoriously difficult to refute; the more you say you aren’t the more latent you therefore are. But I believed that the evidence of the afternoon I’d spent in bed with Fitz, each of us on either side of Sharon, was in my favour. There had never been the faintest suggestion of an impropriety between us. We had divided Sharon up and worked in close but formal proximity, like a couple of eminent surgeons hitherto unknown to each other except by reputation. On the rare occasions we accidentally touched we apologized extravagantly; at moments of culmination or of crisis for one, the other looked away. We comported ourselves, at all times, impeccably. Only once, that I was aware of, had I confused a bit of Fitzpiers for a not dissimilar bit of Sharon, and I had leapt from the contact as if it had been leprous.

Camilla would not have been at all satisifed with that account of my lack of interest in Fitzpiers’s person. ‘You don’t have to think you like it to want it,’ she told me more than once. ‘It’s the horror that would get you in, every time.’ But this was Sharon not Camilla. And I could prove Sharon wrong on all three counts.

The odd thing was, however, that although Sharon resented me for giving her to Fitzpiers, she didn’t resent Fitzpiers. What’s more, she continued to invite him over and she continued to compound the sin she could not forgive me for initiating. I drew this anomaly to her attention.

‘But you say you don’t mind,’ she reminded me.

‘But you say you want me to mind.’

‘Yes, but you don’t.’

‘And what if I did?’

‘You’d say it if you did.’

‘And would you stop seeing him if I said it?’

‘Say it and find out.’